Comparing Government and Private Sector Compensation in Canada finds that government workers in Canada get 10.6 per cent higher pay than comparable private-sector workers and also enjoy more generous benefits—including earlier retirement, more personal leave, more job security and better pensions.

The 2016 Global Petroleum Survey finds that Alberta continues to look less attractive for investment in the eyes of oil and gas companies, while neighbouring Saskatchewan keeps looking better. In this year’s global ranking, Alberta dropped 18 spots to 43rd out of 96 jurisdictions worldwide, and Saskatchewan is ranked 4th. Globally, Oklahoma is the most attractive jurisdiction for petroleum upstream investments, followed by Texas.

The Report Card on Ontario’s Elementary Schools 2016 ranks 2,900 public and Catholic schools (and a small number of independent schools) based on nine academic indicators from results of annual provincewide reading, writing and math tests. It finds that despite overall declining math scores in Ontario, some schools have maintained high levels of student success. The 25 English-language schools with the best four-year average math scores include 15 public schools, six independent schools and four Catholic schools located across the province.

United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Bahrain are, once again, the top three most economically-free nations in the Arab world, according to Economic Freedom of the Arab World: 2016 Annual Report, co-published by the Fraser Institute, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty and the International Research Foundation. This report compares and ranks 21 Arab nations in five areas of economic freedom: size of government, including expenditures, taxes and enterprises; commercial and economic law and security of property rights; access to sound money; freedom to trade internationally; and regulation of credit, labour and business.

The Five Solitudes of Ontario: A Regional Analysis of Labour Market Performance in Post-Recession Ontario finds that decent economic performance—especially job growth—in Toronto and the surrounding Golden Horseshoe region is hiding the fact that the rest of Ontario still hasn’t fully recovered from the 2009 recession. Total employment in Ontario outside the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) stood at 2.24 million in 2008. By the end of 2015, the most recent year of available data, that figure stood at 2.17 million, still 70,000 jobs shy of pre-recession levels.

Human Freedom Index, 2016 finds Canada is the sixth freest country in the world, while the United States continues to decline dropping from 20th to 23rd this year. The index ranks 159 countries and jurisdictions based on 79 indicators of personal, civil and economic freedoms and is a joint project with the Cato Institute in the U.S. and the Liberales Institut of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Germany.

Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2016 finds that Canadian patients waited longer than ever this year for medical treatment. The median wait time in Canada in 2016 was 20 weeks—the longest ever recorded—and more than double the 9.3 weeks Canadians waited in 1993, when the Fraser Institute began tracking wait times for medically necessary elective treatments. Among the provinces, Ontario recorded the shortest wait time at 15.6 weeks—up from 14.2 weeks in 2015. New Brunswick recorded the longest wait time (38.8 weeks). It’s estimated that Canadians are currently waiting for nearly one million medically necessary procedures.